It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (34 page)

Roger Ebert (of the
Chicago Sun-Times
), long a fan of Brooks’s, had many reservations about Mel’s newest movie release and gave it a rating of only two and a half stars (out of a possible four). “Almost all of Hitchcock’s fifty-three or so films have their great moments of wit. And wit—the ability to share a sense of subtle fun with an audience—is not exactly Mel Brooks’s strong point. He takes such key Hitchcock moments as the shower scene from
Psycho
, the climbing scene from
Vertigo,
and the shooting in
North by Northwest
and he clobbers them. It’s not satire; it’s overkill.” Ebert observed that, in the process of affectionately spoofing Hitchcock, Brooks almost buries “his own comic talent in the attempt to fit things into his satirical formula. The best moments in
High Anxiety
come not when Brooks is being assaulted in the shower with a rolled-up newspaper, but when Brooks leaves Hitchcock altogether and does his own crazy, brilliant stuff.”

The film’s finest moments of inspired lunacy include scenes depicting the hero coping with his fear of heights aboard an airplane and in the hotel’s glass-enclosed outdoor elevators, which scale the heights of the skyscraper; the sequence in which the would-be cool and sophisticated psychiatrist croons a song in the hotel saloon; and the broadly played episode in which the fleeing hero and heroine escape police detection by passing through an airport security station dressed as an elderly Jewish couple engaged in a loud screaming match.

Made at an estimated cost of $3.4 million,
High Anxiety
earned $19.16 million in domestic theater rentals. Once again, while the picture enjoyed relatively healthy profits from its U.S. and foreign distribution and subsequent ancillary sales, it represented a growing trend with Brooks’s pictures since
Young Frankenstein
: moviegoers were
not
making Mel’s movies such a must-see event as just a few years ago and, thus, the number of tickets sold to Brooks’s latest theatrical entries was slackening off.

Adding to the filmmaker’s concern about his industry status and future,
High Anxiety
failed to win any nominations from either the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or the Writers Guild of America. (The picture was up for two Golden Globes but lost out in both instances.) When
High Anxiety
did not receive any nomination from the academy or from the Writers Guild, Mel Brooks fell into great despair. According to Anne Bancroft, he was “as low as I’ve ever known him.” Despite—or because of—the disappointment that tore at his self-confidence, Mel vowed, “I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself. I want to go on making the loudest noise to the most people. If I can’t do that, I’m not going to make a quiet, exquisite noise for a cabal of cognoscenti.”

27
Stretching His Career Horizons

Sometimes, if people are staring at me; they see it’s Mel Brooks, and I’m at a traffic light. I will pretend to have a heart attack and fall over my steering wheel. The horn will blow very loudly for a long time, and everybody will get out of their cars and start to run over—and then I’ll drive away. Sometimes I’m really Meshuginah. Once, I was on a bus with a friend of mine and I put a lot of hard, white candies in my mouth. I just kept spitting them out. And I said: “I can’t go on like this. My teeth are literally falling out of my mouth.” And I kept spitting out these candies that looked like teeth as I talked. Hysterical. I just loved doing it.

–Mel Brooks, 1978

In a relatively short period in the mid-1970s, Mel Brooks had turned out four Hollywood feature films and a TV series. Each venture had demanded a good deal of his energy, creative input, and time, as Brooks wore so many hats on each project. In 1978, Mel had no new film project ready for release because he couldn’t decide which project under consideration might be the best one to bolster his faltering box-office standing.

Now in his early 50s, he was still a man of youthful vitality and many enthusiasms. These interests—which helped to distract him from career pressures—included being a wine connoisseur with a well-stocked wine cellar, an avid tennis player, a book collector, a real estate investor, and a man who loved to host gatherings of friends. Most of all, after 14 years of marriage to Anne Bancroft, Brooks was still a devoted husband and continued to remain in awe of her. (Brooks commented of his spouse, “She is a remarkable woman. Every year I see her grow more as a person and as an artist. I really like her, you know? As well as love her.… I think that that’s really what a good relationship is based on—liking each other. If someone tried to pin me down on what makes a relationship work—‘Is it having enough money?’ ‘Is it sex?’—I would say, ‘It’s good company.’”)

The Brooks family now resided in Beverly Hills at 915 North Foothill Road. The expansive estate boasted a swimming pool and a guesthouse. One visitor to the house during that time recalled recently, “The interior was very classy: decorated by Anne in shades of beige and brown; natural-colors. I found the furniture magnificent and perfectly matching the colors. I remember well a huge ‘early American’ cupboard in the living room. It looked great.”

Mel remained in contact with his three children from his first marriage. He saw them when he was on the East Coast promoting his latest projects or when vacationing at Fire Island, or sometimes they visited him in Los Angeles. His eldest, Stefanie, now 23, had attended Brandeis University and, thereafter, for a time, was a production assistant within the film industry working on such features as
Going in Style
,
The First Deadly Sin, The Cotton Club
, and 84
Charing Cross Road.
However, most of Mel’s quality time was spent with his and Anne’s child, Max, now six.

In 2003, when Max Brooks was promoting the publication of the first book
(The Zombie Survival Guide
) he had written, he recalled his childhood spent in Southern California. “I was always an outsider. The kids I went to school with were far richer than we were, but I was singled out as the rich kid because everybody knew who my dad was.… We lived in the hills, so for me it meant trees and wild shrubbery and every Sunday walking the dog to the top of the hill with my dad and looking out over LA. Dad didn’t like living there, though—I think it offended his sense of morality. He was always uncomfortable with being flashy.… He used to drive me to school every day and his car was a 1982 Honda Accord, which I thought was the coolest car in the world.

“In his mind, money is not a status symbol—it’s a defense against medication. When he was a kid, his four back teeth were rotting, and they said to his immigrant Russian Jewish mother, ‘We can pull them for 50 cents or we can fill them for a dollar.’ She thought, ‘What a bargain—pull them!’ So for him, money is something to protect you from the dangers of the world.”

Mel had his own recollection of his last-born’s formative years: “Max was such a terrific kid. He was like one of those science-fiction children who know more than their parents. He was very bright and very good-natured. When he was only about nine, we went traveling around Europe with friends and we ended up in Venice. There were these rows of cabanas on the beach and we were next to a French couple. The woman was saying, ‘You are paying for the sun—why isn’t your child on the beach?’ So I decided to find out, and had a look in the changing area in the back, and there he was… writing his first story. I never encouraged it, though. I don’t know where he got it from. I guess life was hard, living with his mother and me, and he liked make-believe a lot better.”

Brooks also noted of his son, “He couldn’t understand why a stranger would come over to our table in a restaurant and tell us how much they adored us and wanted a picture or an autograph.… I think I was a bad father in that way too; I was always kind to fans at his expense. Not spending enough precious moments with him.… I was afraid to go to a lot of places. I never took him to a lot of baseball games because … you can get surrounded by a lot of crazy people. There’s a brush stroke of paranoia there, which kept me from a normal father and son thing.”

•     •     •

By the late 1970s, Mel Brooks was still riding the crest of his
Blazing Saddles
and
Young Frankenstein
successes. Based on their box-office returns, and to a lesser degree his next two pictures, he enjoyed real power within the Hollywood film industry and liked to talk about his enviable position in the community. (If some of Brooks’s statements at the time smacked of self-serving remarks geared to bolster his ego and to remind the business of how important he was, so be it. Tinseltown was used to such pronouncements and took them with a grain of salt.) Mel allowed, “It’s an achievement of a kind to know that I can walk into any studio—any one in town—and just say my name, and the president will fly out from behind his desk and open his door. It’s terrific, it’s a great feeling. My worst critic is my wife. She keeps me straight. She says, ‘Are you pleasing that mythical public of yours again, or is this really funny and heartfelt?’” Despite his string of recent successes, Brooks remained very much a product of his childhood. “I’m a Brooklyn boy who was brought up in a materialistic society. And I know that money makes right. Not might but money. Money is everything.”

The successful entertainer acknowledged, “All kinds of things make me laugh. I like ‘life’ things better than I like made-up things. People don’t know how wonderfully funny they are.… I like to really see characters like that [e.g., a fat woman in a bakery arguing over calories].… And I miss that in Los Angeles. In New York you see a lot more of it—a lot more crazies on the street, a lot more action in the little retail stores, and a lot more give and take ‘twixt and ‘tween the public.… And it’s hard for me to observe life now, because even if I try, say in a restaurant, a place where people congregate, they’re looking at me. So being famous is not a good idea for being a writer.”

When Mel was asked to reveal his upcoming career plans, he somewhat dodged the question with his response: “I’ll wait to be thoroughly moved, rocked by an idea. Just remarkably insane, I hope, and a joy to work on. You have to surround the insanity with a great deal of logic and sense. Let me get a great, insane idea and then house it in a good, logical structure and I’m very happy. I’ll write it for a year, and then if it’s no good, I’ll tear it up and go on to another one. But if it’s good, we’ll make it. Usually we know when it’s going well. When it writes itself, we know it’s good.”

One of the topics Brooks was increasingly being asked to comment on were the career parallels and dissimilarities between him and the nearly 10-years-younger Woody Allen, his chief rival as the contemporary king of American film comedy. (At the time, Allen was riding his own crest, having won two Oscars, for directing and coscripting 1977’s
Annie Hall
, and was soon to release
Manhattan.
) Mel noted of his competitor and himself, “Woody will feel something and then disguise it skillfully and issue it. I know what I do best and I am theatrical. Woody is not theatrical. He’s shy and very private, almost academic.… I chose not to be philosophical or intellectual. I choose to tap dance as much as I can. I think of it as a job, not a mission and not an artistic endeavor.”

•     •     •

In 1979, Mel’s only big-screen output was a cameo appearance in Jim Henson’s
The Muppet Movie.
He was on camera briefly as the mad Professor Max Krassman, one of the live characters who encounters Kermit the Frog when the latter is convinced by his talent agent (played by Dom DeLuise) to try his luck in Hollywood. The family-fare entry was a huge commercial success.

Meanwhile, Brooks had been quietly laying the groundwork for new show business ventures of his own. He had formed a new production company, Brooksfilms, to take the place of Crossbow Productions (whose final project was
High Anxiety
). Mel intended for the new entity to produce serious films beyond his own comedic projects. In forming the organization, he was motivated by the conviction that “somewhere in the Talmud, it tells you that you must return a portion of your gain in this world. You must give back.” In addition, he had been prompted into this new business venture because he had thought, “I’m just becoming a crowd-pleaser. What have I got to say? ... I couldn’t use my art just to make a living.” (There also must have been a part of Brooks that sensed he should cover his options in the film business, in case his screen comedies continued to dip in popularity at the box office.)

According to the moviemaker, “I very skillfully hid my name when I created Brooksfilms. I very assiduously kept the name Mel Brooks away from [these projects].” Brooks understood that if the public at large associated his brand of humor with the output of Brooksfilms it would set up wrong expectations for the company’s releases.

It was Mel’s belief that he could best express his decades-old love of the (international) cinema by encouraging new filmmakers to make creative and ambitious projects. (There was also a practical reason to Brooks’s giving a helping hand to relatively new talent: “I’m not really that benevolent, loving and giving a human being. I’m really being much more selfish. I think that first-time people doing a big first-time job in any field will give you 110 percent. If you find the right people and you give them an opportunity, you know the bread you cast upon the water will not come back soggy. You’re going to get something good there.”)

One of the first individuals to benefit from Mel’s new production banner was his wife, Anne. She had been coping with the longtime film industry problem of diminishing career opportunities available to leading ladies once they passed the age of 40. Recently, Bancroft had suffered through a thankless role in the 1976 potboiler
Lipstick
, while giving an Oscar-nominated performance in the next year’s
The Turning Point.
Thereafter, challenging movie role offers had dried up for her, and she turned to TV (playing Mary Magdalene in the miniseries
Jesus of Nazareth
) and returned to the Broadway stage (in William Gibson’s
Golda
, a short-lived drama about Israel’s premier, Golda Meir).